😊 How Do You Feel?

Why this helps

A feelings chart is a page of simple faces your child can point to instead of having to find the words. It helps because nobody can manage a feeling they cannot name, and big emotions live in the body long before a child has language for them — which is what a meltdown, as opposed to a tantrum, so often is: a feeling too large to hold, and no way to explain it. Pointing to a little face gives your child a first, easy way to say ‘this is what’s happening inside me’.

Naming a feeling also takes some of its heat out. When a child moves from ‘everything is awful’ to ‘I feel frustrated’, the feeling becomes something you can face together rather than something that just crashes over them. In our clinic we treat this as the very first building block of emotional self-control — it comes long before any calming strategy, because a child has to know what they are calming down from before the Calm-Down Steps card can give them something to do about it.

The children we see it help fastest are the ones whose feelings run ahead of their words: the toddler whose upset arrives at full volume with no warning, the child who can talk beautifully until they are flooded and then goes silent, and the child who is still building spoken language at all. It also gives a quiet, non-verbal way in for autistic children, who often find naming a feeling far harder than feeling it. In sessions we rarely start with all twelve faces — we cover most of the chart and work with three or four (happy, sad, angry, scared) until those are genuinely easy, then add the subtler ones like worried, frustrated and shy.

What you can do tomorrow morning matters more than the printing. Point to your own face on the chart at breakfast — ‘I feel a bit tired today’ — so your child sees that feelings are ordinary and safe to say out loud. Notice out loud what you can see, without demanding an answer: ‘your hands are tight, I wonder if that’s angry.’ Then accept whatever they point to. Use the words your family really uses at home, too — خوش (khush), اداس (udaas), غصہ (gussa) sit perfectly happily beside happy, sad and angry, and a child growing up with two languages can learn feeling words in both.

Be honest with yourself about what a chart does. It will not stop tantrums, and it is not meant to. What parents most often tell us they notice first is not fewer big feelings but shorter ones — the storm passes a little quicker because their child has been understood, and after a few weeks some children start reaching for the chart before the storm rather than in the middle of it. If the big feelings mostly cluster around changes and endings — leaving the park, switching off the TV, bedtime — the First–Then board and the Daily Routine chart in this same toolkit usually do more of the work than the feelings chart alone.

A printable is a starting point, not an assessment. Please talk to your doctor, your child’s paediatrician or a therapist if your child has very few words for their age or has lost words they used to use, if the big feelings regularly end with them hurting themselves or someone else, if your child has no reliable way to ask for what they need — by speech, sign, pointing or picture — or if school or nursery is reporting the same distress every single day. Those are signs that a person needs to look at this with you, not a page of faces. If you are unsure whether what you are seeing is worth acting on, our free child development check walks you through the same questions we would ask. If you are in Multan, you can message or call us on +92 314 6040262 and we will talk it through.

Tips for using it well

• Do name your own feelings out loud during the day, so your child learns feelings are normal and safe to talk about.
• Do start with three or four faces and cover the rest — twelve choices is a lot for a child who is already overwhelmed.
• Don’t rush to fix the feeling the moment it’s named — sometimes being understood is the help.
• Do accept whatever your child points to, even if it surprises you; there are no wrong feelings.
• Don’t only reach for the chart in a crisis — chat about the happy faces on calm, ordinary days too.
• Do keep it somewhere your child can grab it themselves when the words won’t come.
• Do pair it with the Calm-Down Steps card in this toolkit — one printable names the feeling, the other gives you both something to do next.
• Do print a second copy for your child’s teacher, so the same faces and the same words are used at school and at home.

Common questions